If you are a fan of Simon Pegg, this trailer for his upcoming film "Burke and Hare" (opening January 31, 2011) might put a smile on your face. It certainly did for me.
"Burke and Hare" is based on the true story of a pair of Irish immigrants, William Burke and William Hare, who supposedly killed more than a dozen people in the late 1800s and sold the corpses to a doctor to provide material for dissection. Apparently their method of murder has given us the word "burking," meaning "to murder by suffocation, or so as to produce few marks of violence, for the purpose of obtaining a body to be sold for dissection." I never knew that. Cool.
Pegg is Burke, Serkis is Hare, and there's a fabulous supporting cast that includes Christopher Lee, Tim Curry, and Tom Wilkinson. Plus it's directed by John Landis, a man who masterfully mixed horror, comedy, and gore in "An American Werewolf in London." Here's the trailer.
One other perk: the film comes from the venerable Ealing Studios. Like Hammer (which just distributed "Let Me In"), Ealing is a British brand that vanished for awhile and now is attempting to come back, reanimating themselves shall we say. It gives me great pleasure to see both these names up on the big screen again. Here's looking forward to the new year and a new Simon Pegg film. Cheers.
